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"Appendix A: Concepts and Definitions of Metropolitan Regions."
Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World.
Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2003.

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Appendices

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CITIES TRANSFORMED
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A
Concepts and Definitions of
Metropolitan Regions
For many years, urban geographers have struggled to find conceptual categories in
which to place those settlements that spread beyond the political or administrative
bounds of the "city" itself. In high-income countries, much effort has gone into
devising new categories appropriate to the evolving nature of cities, beginning
with the recognition of suburbanization in Europe and North America (Cham-
pion, 1998~. The metropolitan concept that evolved over much of the twentieth
century emerged from industrial urban forms: concentrated, core-oriented pro-
duction that, by agglomerating industry and employment in a single center and
packing the population around the center and along radiating transport networks,
provided a spatial solution to the problem of slow and expensive transport (Adams,
1995; Berry, 1995~. The production and distribution of goods and an emphasis
on radial movement to and from the urban core gave way to the rise of the ser-
vice economy, with communications increasingly substituting for movement and
movement occurring in all directions at all times of the day and week, in this way
generating what has been termed an "urban field" (Adams, 1995; Friedmann and
Miller, 1965~.
Recent literature has drawn attention to conceptual analogies in the cities of
poor countries, particularly in terms of the growth and outward spread of
metropolitan areas and the tendency for initially separate urban centers to be
merged in wider metropolitan regions. There is a suggestion that the megacities
of low- and high-income countries may have more in common with each other,
irrespective of their locations on the globe, than they have with other parts of their
own urban systems (Champion, 1998~. McGee and Griffiths (1998), for example,
note the convergence of Bangkok and Los Angeles, both being territorially vast,
amorphous, multicentered regions with populations residing up to 100 kilometers
from the city core.
481

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CITIES TRANSFORMED
In recent years, many researchers have argued that the simple classifications of
"central city" and "suburb" have become obsolete. In the United States and else-
where, these researchers see an emerging pattern of settlement taking the form of
increasingly dispersed and decentralized centers of activity and residential zones
(Berry, 1995; Castells, 1989; Fishman, 1990~. To try to incorporate this new and
evolving reality into a definition of settlement forms for use in the dissemination
of statistical data is clearly a daunting task.
In the decade leading up to the 2000 Census, the U.S. Bureau of the Census
oversaw a large-scale review of alternative approaches to delineating metropolitan
and nonmetropolitan settlements as part of an examination of metropolitan area
(MA) statistical standards. This review was unusually thorough and is perhaps
as interesting for its participatory process as for its conclusions. The overriding
concern was that metropolitan standards had become needlessly complex, both
conceptually and operationally.
Greatest attention was paid to the definition of building blocks the small-
est territorial units from which cities and metropolitan regions are formed the
methods of aggregating these blocks, and territorial coverage. Four papers were
commissioned for the review, and these papers outlined four rather different ap-
proaches (Adams, 1995; Berry, 1995; Frey and Speare, 1995; Morrill, 1995~.
Some of the researchers advocated the use of census tracts as the basic geospatial
unit, with journey-to-work data being used to define clusters. The authors of two
papers favored the use of counties, however, with one of these papers suggesting
that commuting time be used as a clustering criterion and the other suggesting the
use of population density.
The analytic task was complicated by external constraints and pressures, in-
cluding political pressure from local interests. Many smaller cities expressed an
interest in being designated as standard metropolitan areas (SMAs) for prestige
and business reasons, and many developed public relations campaigns and applied
political pressure on their congressional delegations (Dahmann, l999~.
In the end, the review resulted in a recommendation that a core-based statisti-
cal area (CBSA) classification replace the MA classification. The cores (i.e., the
densely settled concentrations of population) would be Census Bureau-defined
urbanized areas and smaller densely settled "settlement clusters" identified in
Census 2000. The CBSA classification identified three types of areas on the
basis of total population of all cores in the CBSA: (1) megapolitan areas, de-
fined around cores of at least 1 million population; (2) macropolitan areas, defined
around cores of 50,000 to 999,999 population; and (3) micropolitan areas,
defined around cores of 10,000 to 49,000 population. The identification of
micropolitan areas extended the concepts of core-based approaches to smaller
population centers, which had previously been relegated to a nonmetropolitan
residual category. This new approach addressed the problem that the area out-
side metropolitan settlements, which includes more than 10,000 smaller cities and

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CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS OF METROPOLITAN REGIONS 483
towns, huge expanses of open country, and over four-fifths of U.S.land, had been
consigned to an uncategorized and undifferentiated status.
Because data on counties and their equivalents are both available and familiar,
the review recommended continued use of these entities as the building blocks
for statistical areas, although it did not preclude the adoption of subcountry en-
tities, such as tracts or mail (ZIP) code areas, for the future. It was further de-
cided that commuting (journey-to-work) data from the Census Bureau (which will
soon be available on an annual basis from the Census Bureau's American Com-
munity Survey) should continue to be regarded as the most reliable measure of
functional integration between areas. The utility of other data measuring func-
tional ties including telephone traffic patterns, cellular telephone service, media
market penetration, Internet use, and purchasing patterns was evaluated. The re-
view generated the recommendation that a commuting threshold of 25 percent be
adopted to establish qualifying linkages between outlying counties and counties
containing CBSA cores. It was noted that the percentage of a county's employed
residents who commuted to the central county or counties (or who commuted
from outlying to central counties) was an unambiguous, clear measure of whether
a potential outlying county should qualify for inclusion.
In a striking departure from the previous MA standard, a recommendation
of the review was not to use measures of "settlement structure." In the previous
standard, the level of population density, the percentage urban, and population
growth rates were all used, together with measures of commuting, to establish
whether outlying counties should be included in an MA. The review led to the
conclusion that with the changes in the nature of settlement, commuting patterns,
and communications technologies, settlement structure had lost much of its former
connection to industrial, occupational, and family structure and could no longer
serve as a reliable indicator of metropolitan character.